Social Hacking

  Welcome to the first lesson in something I like to call social hacking. Social hacking is the art of hacking, playing with, and foremost understanding your mind and the minds of people around you. One close thing to social hacking is social engineering, which is widely know. I would say that difference between these two is that social engineering is mainly focused on acquiring information, while social hacking can be used not only to get information, but also to persuade and confuse others. (Yes, getting others confused might be a positive thing.) My goal is to present new ideas to you, the reader, and hopefully get some response and ideas back from you. All ideas presented here are things that I have realized, learned, and/or experienced. I will try to keep the language of this blog on a basic level, anyone should be able to read and understand what I am trying to say.
  A little about me; I am a 21 year old computer scientist who lives in Sweden. I have never studied psychology. My view of the world is very scientific. I am an atheist, however, I am trying to be very open to new ideas and I would not say that I am an agnostic.
  So on to the fun stuff. Have you ever seen or experienced any social hacking? I would say that you are hacked every day in some way. All news papers you read are affecting the way you think, and thereby in some way controlling your mind. Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that you should not trust anyone else, just keep an open mind. Check if the news paper list their sources, which they rarely do. I'll give you a small example involving the whole global warming debate. I could for example tell you that there is no such thing as global warming since I just called a penguin on the north pole, and he told me that it is still ****ing cold! Would you believe me? Is that a reliable source?
  I have found that trust is one of the most, if not the most, important things when trying to hack someone. When you have someone's trust, they will listen and believe what you say. So the first step is to gain trust. This can be done in a variety of ways. The first way I am going to talk about is being smart. Try to think of the smartest person you know. Would you believe him if he or she told you that a quantum shift was cause by the oscillation of electrons in molecules? Well, for this example to work you should not know that much quantum physics. If you do, try to imagine this person telling you that Britney Spears is using a strawberry flavored lip balm in her armpits, would you believe him or her? (If you know the answer to both of these statements, you know too much... sorry, I can't help you) My guess is that you would believe this person even though the two statements I just mentions were completely made up.
  You are probably wondering how you can be smart. Well the real problem in this case is only making someone else believe that you are smart. Ok, you got me, it does help if you are a really are smart. By realizing this I promote you to “nefarious genius”. My guess is that you are (if you have not already done so) looking up the definition of “nefarious”. By using one unknown word, I have planted a small seed in your head, telling you that I am smarter than you. If you did not look it up, you will probably still be thinking of that word and not be to focused on what I am writing. If you already knew the word, congrats! You are on the same level as I am, I failed. Knowledge is commonly confused with actually being smart, which I think are two separate things. However, due to this, you can act smart by knowing a lot of things. However, you will appear even smarter if you know things that others don't know. I will discuss more of this in the future. Instead I will now talk about what I think a smart person should be good at and that is problem solving. There is one thing in this area that I really want you to try, and that is to think outside the box. Try to come up with things that few others would think of. I'll give you a challenge:
Take a piece of paper and a pencil. On the paper I want you to draw four lines, that are the same length and shape and are equally space for each other. The lines do not have to straight.
Would you be able to accomplish this task?
  The first approach would be to draw the four lines and try to do it as neatly as possible. The “outside of the box”-approach (yes, I made up a new word) would be to draw just one line and claim that it is four lines on top of each other. You might think that this is a pretty stupid example (bingo!), however, things just like this will differ you from others and hopefully convincing them that you are smart.

  If you have read this far I would first of all like to thank you, and then I would like to apologize if I wasted too much of your precious time. If you actually liked what you read or have some own thoughts on the topic, please leave a comment.

  As a last note I would like to mention that I do not recommend to missuses the trust you have gained from others. Think of who your real friends are and be nice to them!

Thanks for your time!